Interview Roundup

Congratulations to my litblogging buddy Mark Sarvas (left), who achieved local celebrity status as the subject of an interview with LAist (which makes him my second friend to wind up on that site in the last month, after Ruth Andrew Ellenson). He explains litblogs to Angelenos, refuses to get pinned down on his favorite restaurants, and shares his favorite biking routes.

I’ve actually been saving up a bunch of interview links, and now seems as good a time as any to finally share them with you:

• Lydia Millet chats with Strange Horizons about writing a novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, that’s got science and fiction but isn’t quite science fiction, except that it sort of is: “I wanted the book to reach across literary fiction lines into the realm of the speculative; I wanted it to be read by people who wouldn’t normally read my books, people usually more interested in politics and science and fiction that deals with the imaginary than in fiction that centers on play with language.”
• Robert Birnbaum’s keeping himself busy, landing interviews with Chip Kidd and George Packer.

• In the realm of comic books, we’ve got interviews with Harvey Pekar (“I don’t think the people that like my work the most are superhero comic-book readers because it took getting out of the comic-book stores for my stuff to start selling”) and Seth, the most elegantly dressed man in comics (“For a long time, the way I dressed was deliberately anachronistic, but now it’s mostly a habit”). And, what the heck, Matt Madden, because I really dig his 99 Ways to Tell a Story.

17 January 2006 | interviews |

Interview Roundup: Sgt. Rock Is Going to Help Me

• “Living legend of comics” Joe Kubert talks about the new Sgt. Rock story he’s writing for DC—and why his graphic novel Jew Gangster ended up with iBooks. Excerpts from both books are included.

• “Seattle’s best writer… is an Englishman” is the front-page headline trumpeting the Seattle Weekly interview with Jonathan Raban, admiringly described as “a backwater media critic chronically sought out by media monoliths” though, as former Amazon editor James Marcus points out in the piece, “he transcends the regional-writer rubric the way Faulkner did.”

• UK readers discover Sara Gran, who spills some of the beans regarding her new novel, Dope. Sara’s recently started a blog, too, where she writes about everything from reading Charles Portis to volunteering with the ASPCA in New Orleans.

• The American Booksellers Association’s Bookselling This Week gets personal with Laila Lalami, who admits that she moved to Portland for Powells. Hey, don’t think the Beatrices haven’t considered it, too…

18 November 2005 | interviews |